Frontline employees are essential to how many companies operate: stores, factories, warehouses, restaurants, healthcare facilities, construction sites, branches, or traveling sales teams.
Yet they're often the hardest group to reach when a company launches an internal survey.
The reason is simple: communication tools designed for office employees don't always match their day-to-day reality.
Frontline employees don't necessarily have a professional email address, a computer, or daily access to Teams, Slack, or the intranet. BCG estimates that "deskless" workers make up around 70 to 80% of the global workforce.
So how do you effectively reach frontline employees in an employee survey?
Why are frontline employees harder to reach?
Before choosing a channel, you need to understand the constraints these populations face.
A frontline employee may:
- not have a work computer;
- not check their email regularly;
- work staggered hours;
- be spread across multiple sites;
- not have access to the intranet;
- have little time available during their day;
- not use the same tools as headquarters teams.
A survey sent only by email therefore risks measuring employees' digital availability more than their actual engagement.
A Firstup study of 1,000 "deskless" workers in the US found that 32% of them consider their company less effective at communicating with them than with office-based employees, while 39% say they receive some messages at inconvenient times.
The first principle is therefore simple: to reach frontline employees, the survey needs to adapt to their work environment, not the other way around.
5 levers to reach frontline employees
1. Prioritize a mobile experience
The smartphone is often the most accessible digital touchpoint for employees who don't work in front of a computer.
A survey should therefore be:
- accessible from a smartphone;
- quick to complete;
- readable on a small screen;
- simple to start;
- usable without a complex login process.
The goal is to minimize friction as much as possible:
one message → one link → a few minutes → done.
2. Don't rely on a single channel
There's no universal channel for all frontline employees.
Depending on your organization, you can combine:
- email;
- SMS;
- mobile app;
- QR code;
- on-site signage;
- verbal communication;
- team briefings;
- frontline managers;
- internal communication tools.
The same Firstup study shows that deskless employees can face a proliferation of channels, with 22% of respondents saying there are too many different places to look for information.
The right approach isn't necessarily to multiply channels.
You need to identify the few channels each population actually uses.
3. Use managers as relays
For frontline populations, the frontline manager can play a decisive role.
They can announce the survey during a briefing or shift handover:
"An employee survey is available this week. It takes about 5 minutes and lets you share your feedback directly with HR."
The manager makes it easier to access the survey without influencing the answers.
Their role should remain that of a facilitator, not a controller. In particular, they should never try to find out who responded or what any individual employee answered.
Recent research on internal communication also shows that 42% of frontline employees prefer to receive important information directly from their manager, confirming just how much the quality of managerial communication shapes their experience at work.
4. Choose the right timing
A survey can be perfectly designed and still get few responses simply because it was sent at the wrong time.
For frontline employees, take into account:
- work schedules;
- shift changes;
- periods of high activity;
- breaks;
- travel;
- seasonal periods;
- days off.
A team working staggered hours won't necessarily have the same windows of availability as an office team.
It can therefore be worth planning communications adapted to different work rhythms.
5. Explain why their opinion matters
The problem isn't purely technical.
A frontline employee may also wonder:
"Why is the company asking for my opinion if decisions are made at headquarters?"
Communication around the survey therefore needs to be especially clear. Explain:
- Why we're asking employees — we want to better understand your day-to-day experience.
- What we'll do with the answers — results will be analyzed to identify our main improvement priorities.
- What guarantees confidentiality — individual answers will not be shared with your manager.
- What happens next — key takeaways and the actions decided will be shared with teams.
This last step is essential. A survey with no follow-up can quickly make employees feel like they're talking "into a void."
How do you increase frontline employee participation?
An effective strategy rests on four principles:
- Keep it simple — a short survey is easier to fit into a workday.
- Make it accessible — employees should be able to respond from the environment they actually use.
- Build trust — anonymity or confidentiality must be clearly explained.
- Follow up — employees need to know what came out of the survey and what actions will follow.
The goal isn't simply to get more responses. It's to get responses that are representative of the whole company.
An overall participation rate of 75% can be misleading if frontline teams make up only 35% of respondents. To go further on participation levers, check out our article "How to Increase Employee Survey Participation Rates".
How do you measure frontline employee participation?
So don't look only at the overall participation rate.
Also analyze participation by:
- site or location;
- job function;
- team;
- region;
- seniority;
- type of population;
- frontline vs. office-based employees.
This helps quickly identify underrepresented populations. For example:
| Population | Participation |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | 82% |
| Managers | 76% |
| Sales | 68% |
| Production | 54% |
| Stores | 41% |
In this example, the problem isn't the overall rate. The problem is frontline populations' access to the survey.
This analysis then lets you adapt channels, timing, and reminders.
How can Yuno help survey frontline employees?
To run a successful employee survey, the tool needs to be able to adapt to the company's different populations.
Yuno lets you create and distribute surveys to employees, with an experience designed to make participation and feedback collection easier. The platform also offers anonymization, scheduling, and response analysis features.
The point is not to limit listening to employees who have a computer or a professional email address. An effective employee listening approach needs to be able to include every population in the company.
5 questions to ask before launching a frontline survey
Before sending your next survey, ask yourself these five questions:
- Can every employee easily access the survey?
- Is the questionnaire suited to mobile use?
- Have we chosen the right channels for each population?
- Do managers know how to promote the survey?
- Have we planned to share the results and the actions taken?
If the answer to any of these questions is "no," your setup risks leaving part of the workforce behind.
Conclusion
Surveying frontline employees isn't simply about sending them the same questionnaire as headquarters.
You need to design a survey experience suited to their professional reality. That means:
mobile + simplicity + the right channels + manager relays + good timing + transparency.
But above all, you need to build a genuine feedback loop:
listen → analyze → act → communicate → listen again.
It's this continuity that turns a simple internal survey into a genuine employee listening practice.
And the more employees see their voice leading to concrete action, the more natural it becomes for them to take part in future surveys.